


Lady of the Mantle Green

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Tam Lin - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 02:27:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7081033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has come of age cloaked in the stories about Takodana Forest, its long shadows and its longer-toothed wildness and the dark things that creep through it but leave no footprints behind. You must never go there, Rey's people have always warned, for therein is the realm of Kylo Ren.</p><p>But she has also come of age hearing the stories about Master Skywalker the mage, who vanished, and of that most talented young knight amongst Queen Organa's company who vanished as well. He dressed all in black armor, the men have always sworn. And he bore a sword that shone like burning embers through the night, a name that meant ‘son of the right hand.’</p><p>Lady Rey herself has no magic, at least none she can speak of, so perhaps she is ill-suited to a world of dark sorcerers and their otherworldly courts and mortal men with two names who are kept in thrall as future tithes to hell. She has a clear pair of eyes and a steady pair of arms, however, and these have served her well enough so far. She suspects – and she may be correct in this regard – that they will be sufficient for whatever happens next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lady of the Mantle Green

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to wait on publishing this until more of the story was solidly drafted and written, but I think I’ve got the major stuff mostly settled by now and uploading at least something always helps me commit.
> 
> So, without further ado, here’s that Tam Lin retelling I was talking about.

…

He wore a black shroud upon his face, some said, and beneath it his eyes shone like two burning coals, while others claimed he wore a mask wrought from the wood of a lightning-cloven aspen tree and had no eyes at all. No, another faction replied, no, no, no, his mask was made from human bone, scorched its present color by an ancient heretic’s execution pyre, while the cloak was really a thousand bat wings spun together with a single thread of orb-spider silk. Preposterous, still others would correct. Inconceivable. It was owl feathers, that cloak of his, owl feathers with their silencing saw-shaped edges. That was why his footfalls never made a sound as he crept toward you through the shadows. He was as old as the mountains and the rivers that could cut them in twain, as wicked as the sharp side of a winter wind, as ever-enduring as an unconfessed sin.

And the deathless monster of Takodana Forest fed on fresh hearts, naturally, because he didn’t have one himself. Or plucked-out eyes, for a similar reason. Or tender maidens, or disobedient children, or no-good rotten whoreson liars who cheated at games of dice.

At this juncture the debate usually required an application of fists, along with feet and knees for added rhetorical effect. Discussions often carried from the livery stables to the castle’s inner courtyard and ended atop its midden heap, when the lady of the estate waded out with a grain-threshing flail – she hung it on pegs by the door for this precise purpose – and clobbered somebody senseless.

(People did not come to Jakku Castle so much as they were driven there, dragging pasts they never spoke of and crimes they preferred not to swing on the gallows for.

It was also where the roads ended, so you could go no further even if you wished to. Which you rarely did.)

 “If that monster is on my grandfather’s land,” Lady Rey punctuated this with another whack, “then that makes him my vassal. If I should ever meet him, I will remind him his payment of homage is long past due – then he may eat my heart, if he so pleases, but I expect to get something worthwhile in the bargain.”

“Your heart, milady? I wouldn’t, if I were him.” This was Plutt, the bailiff, who could recall everybody’s outstanding debts going back twenty years and smelled like a leaky barrel of brined fish.  A new red welt was sprouting on his head. “He’s liable to crack a tooth at the first bite.”

“I’m sure.” Rey lifted her skirts above the grey, wheel-rutted spring mud. “And if this Kylo Ren creature finds anything disagreeable about those terms, he can bring his case before my lord father and lady mother upon their return.”

Then she swung the flail onto her shoulder, hopped lightly over a very dazed groomsman trying to account for all twelve of his teeth, and strode back into the kitchens.

Everyone watched her go.

The lady’s name was not Rey, properly speaking, but nobody that far past the map’s northern borders could curl its middle syllable just right and so they never bothered. She had flat feet, scrubbed pink skin that burned speckly brown during the summer haying season, and was sapling-skinny enough that a modestly strong man could hold her up with one arm – he would no doubt receive a kick to the shins for his effort, however, so this notion was pure speculation. She would be twenty come the autumn.

Her castle’s foundation stood atop the unmarked mass grave of a long-ago battle, which made it no different from most great men or great nations of history, and its crumbling sandstone masonry was bound together with the greenbrier vines that tangled through its bricks like thoughts in a maddened mind. The steward’s tower had been listing all winter, while many places along its curtain wall were held up by nothing but clay daub, stout timber, and Lady Rey’s own recalcitrance – yet every night the front gates still screaked open, and all the people of that village came to shelter behind them. They slept on the great hall’s floor, during colder weather, amongst chickens and goats and sheep that came plodding in as well.

Then the vast forest around them was free to make its usual noises, which almost always sounded just the same as a bugling elk or a howling wolf or trees in the wind. And if on occasion the forest sounded otherwise, like a crying boy or a laughing man or like something else entirely, then it was certainly no one’s business.

 _(“Does a sun still rise in the eastern sky?”_ a mother or father would ask the sleepless child beside them, and the child would know enough to answer, _“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and for a thousand years to come.”)_

“What gossipy neighbors we must seem.” Rey raked glowing ashes from a large oven. “Seven years ago they all said Kylo Ren was a wild shade, and before that he was either an elfin knight or a demon. I’m sure five years hence will see him changed into an ogre or a troll. Any facts at this point would no doubt be seen as interfering with the truth – you mustn’t let such nonsense frighten you, is what I mean to say.”

A podgy little boy beside her leaned forward, holding a wooden peel, and slid two lumps of kneaded dough onto the hot oven floor. He dropped back on his heels and moved both widespread hands towards the center of his chest, shaking his head vigorously as he did.

Rey gave a sigh.

Its sound came low and quiet inside the large, empty kitchens. Rushes thrown across the floor were darkened by grease and soot and dried blood, while sweet violets and yellow primroses hung in bundles from the rafters overhead. 

“Forgive my presumption, Sir Bog.” She thumped a dirty hand on her skirt and dropped a starch-edged curtsy. “I say ‘you’ in the general sense, not the particular one. I wouldn’t expect any wights or ogres to affright a future knight such as yourself. And what noble lady will you serve as champion for, someday? Anyone I ought to know?”

The boy’s full name was Bogbean. He was the son of a cottar, who had seven older children and regarded his youngest with the docile, good-natured perplexity of an ox.  Bog possessed a head of turmeric-orange hair, excepting one shock of white behind his left ear and another near his forehead, and could perfectly imitate a starling’s clacks or wood thrush’s whistling trill. They were the only sounds anyone had ever heard him make.

Bog swiped a thumb across his lower lip.

“Oh, it’s a secret. I see.” Rey sat down on a bench, passed him a bowl of barley stew. “I assumed we had enough of those around here already.”

The small boy whistled, sidling closer beside her as she sidled away, and in this manner the lady of Jakku Castle took her evening meal.

…

Her bedchamber was up in the castle’s far eastern tower, looking out over the great forest whose mist turned pale gold in the morning light. There was sporadic talk of relocating her to the master’s quarters, as befitting of her station, but these plans never came to fruition. Nobody truly expected them to. So each night when the gates were locked, the torches lit, Lady Rey would walk up alone through the stairwell’s winding darkness with one hand raised to shield her candle from drafts. 

In a corner of her living quarters, by the knife-narrow window, there stood an old loom with an unfinished green mantle hung on its warp strings.

 It was not the exact same green all the way down, of course, because its bottom corners had grown faded and frayed over time.  She made the wool’s color from sorrel root and lily-of-the-valley flowers, which produced a vibrant green like moss but turned the dye’s bathwater to poison. Here she would sit, each night, and here she would pull her thread back and forth, back and forth.

“Does a sun still rise in the eastern sky?” Rey would ask, aloud, as the shuttle darted along like a minnow, and when it turned for another row she would supply the requisite answer. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and for a thousand years to come.”

She would do this until her candle became a tallow puddle, or else when her sight began to blur about its edges. Whichever came first.

And neatly, without a hint of temper, she would tear out row after row of the finished work until it looked almost the same as when she had begun, excepting for maybe an ell’s length of brilliant, new-spun green rising out of the faded cloth below it – then Rey rewound the spare yarn, coiling it tidily to avoid any knots, and curled up in her child’s bed to sleep. 

Sometimes she did, sometimes she did not. This was nobody’s business either.

…

 


End file.
